No Country for Two Presidents: Zuma’s ridiculous ‘legal’ argument vs Ramaphosa gets tested in court

15 Jan 2023

The Gauteng High Court is due to give its ruling this morning, 16 January 2023, on whether President Cyril Ramaphosa will in fact have to appear in a criminal court in a private prosecution brought by former President Jacob Zuma. While Zuma successfully convicting Ramaphosa is a legal impossibility, the case brings to the fore the relationship between the two presidents, and asks more questions about Zuma’s real intentions.

This “legal” move suggests that in fact Jacob Zuma is focused on his own personal agenda, and in weakening anyone who is trying to “renew” the ANC, especially Ramaphosa as the man at the centre of the movement. It may also be that he is trying to demonstrate some residual political power, despite the fact that the ANC’s recent conference shows that his constituency has shrunk into a vanishingly small space.

Zuma’s main claim against Ramaphosa is laughably weak — he is claiming he has a right to privately prosecute Ramaphosa as an “accessory after the fact” for failing to act against National Prosecuting Authority prosecutor Billy Downer.

It is, of course, a legal nonsense.

Ramaphosa has no power over the NPA and the institution is meant to manage its own affairs. It also does not appear to have issued the legal certificate that Zuma would need for his case to proceed.

Literally no one has faced a private criminal prosecution based on their actions in office. The closest anyone has come so far was the former Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini, who was convicted of perjury — we’re talking about lying in an inquiry into her conduct, rather than for her actions while in office.

Still, several lawyers think that Ramaphosa’s lawyers may not have proven the issue of “urgency” in their application, meaning there is a chance the President could still have to appear in the dock, albeit briefly.

It is clear that those advising Zuma would have known this, and he too is likely to have known that the chance of “convicting” Ramaphosa was zero.

More than a legal battle

But this is the world of retaliatory politics and it is about much more than just a legal angle.

What Zuma has succeeded in doing is making sure that the consequences of his actions have been rather present in the news cycle during the ANC’s December conference, painting Ramaphosa as an embattled politician just in time for the party’s critical elections. A man who has shown himself to be capable of doing almost anything to bring pressure on his enemies, including burning KZN and half of Gauteng in July 2021, Zuma was certainly hoping to force Ramaphosa into making mistakes.

In his private prosecution of Downer and the journalist Karyn Maughan for example, he took money from a known white racist accused of serious crimes for a deposit needed for a private prosecution.

This incident also demonstrated, once again, a near-total lack of ideology to Zuma’s actions — the man who claims to have been victimised for fighting for radical transformation, and who has often invoked race as the central part of his argument — was happy to take the money to achieve a smallest of advantages.

Come to think of it, it should not surprise that the man prepared to use violence would know no limit to what he will do for his own ends.

While a criminal conviction against Ramaphosa will not happen in this case, he may achieve a small victory if Ramaphosa has to appear in the dock, even for just a few minutes.

It would be an image recycled again and again on social media and Iqbal Survé-controlled titles, and used to present Ramaphosa as a criminal, even though he would be acquitted, perhaps just moments after his first appearance.

There may also be another element to this.

It is likely that Zuma himself will finally have to appear in the dock in the next few months, if his criminal trial for receiving the money paid to him corruptly by Schabir Shaik finally begins.

If he can get Ramaphosa in the dock then he can claim, however outlandish it may be, that there is no difference between them, that he and Ramaphosa are the same.

He could also claim that while he is in the dock, in a trial that will last for several years, he could be acquitted, just as Ramaphosa will presumably be.

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It is clear that one of his Zuma agendas is to weaken the legitimacy of the judiciary. Just by forcing judges to rule on cases relating to Ramaphosa, and because Ramaphosa wins these cases (as they should not have been brought in the first place), he can somehow claim that the judges are biased in favour of Ramaphosa.

However, it should be noted that Ramaphosa may be able to spin this too.

If he appears in court on a criminal charge (brought through a private prosecution) which everyone knows to be bogus, and is then quickly acquitted, he could argue this shows he has demonstrated his respect for the rule of law.

He would be able to say that he knew the charge was legal nonsense from the beginning, but such is his respect for the judiciary he answered the summons and abided by the court’s instructions.

Of course, the parallel with Nelson Mandela is obvious, after Madiba agreed to testify under oath in court about his decisions relating to what was then the SA Rugby Football Union in the late 1990s. Ramaphosa’s spin machine would be quick to equate him with Mandela in this case.

SA’s image threatened

That said, Ramaphosa’s legal team was surely correct to point out in their application that the image of the country could be tarnished by having its President appear in a criminal court, even for a short time.

Whatever happens in this case, it is unlikely to be the last legal or political tussle between the two men.

Just two weeks ago, the leader of the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal, Siboniso Duma, said that he supported a plan for the ANC to mediate between the two.

Any such plan is unlikely to succeed. There appears to be a deep level of enmity between them, and Zuma’s consistent attempts to undermine Ramaphosa must surely be raising the levels of frustration.

He has claimed that the ANC is trying to “renew” itself, and that this process is “irrevocable”. There is clear evidence that Zuma is trying to reverse this process. The differences between the two are fundamental, with virtually no chance of an intersection of interests.

One of Zuma’s chief concerns must be his own freedom, and he is unlikely to be able to accept anything that does not guarantee him that. Ramaphosa cannot give him that assurance — it would literally undermine his entire presidency, and what he claims it stands for, as he claims his entire presidency is about the rule of law, no matter the political consequences. DM

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South Africa

More than a legal battle

SA’s image threatened